Arthur Bowen Davies was, in the exact sense of the word, an extraordinary artist. His natural gifts as a draftsman and painter were considerable, his imagination was fertile and at times inspired, his taste and discernment were such that the leading collectors of the day relied on his judgment in the acquisition of works for their collections. It was Davies as the advocate of the "new" who played a leading role in the creation of the Armory Show of 1913.

Apart from these considerations, Davies, in his complexity, can be justly considered a transitional figure, with a style and sentiment that was truly of the nineteenth century and an eye and mind of the twentieth. His motivation was a search for beauty in stylistic terms that were both classic and romantic. Among his contemporaries, the closest parallels are found in the work of the French artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Maurice Denis, and Odilon Redon. Like these artists he was dedicated to the realization of an ideal state of being, a wholly subjective world quite unlike that observed and recorded by his colleagues among The Eight. In fact, his presence in the group serves to demonstrate that more than any stylistic factor it was an independence of spirit that was their common bond.

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